Uh oh ..... when it’s not coming at you there’s no reason to push. Action equals opposite and equal reaction or so has been said
Just wanted to be the first to say “What could go wrong here?”
What will be the forecasted velocity of this impactor?
Can NASA create a impact more substantial than a bug hitting a windshield at speed?
If it’s got solar electric propulsion, why not soft land it
and use that solar electric propulsion to gently ease the
asteroid into a useful orbit?
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature
Send Clint Eastwood
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0186566/
The total cost for NASA to launch DART is about $69 million, which includes the launch service and other mission-related costs, space agency representatives said.
...
SpaceX could be giving them a great price for a dedicated launch. But most likely this is going to be shared with another spacecraft.
So what happens if instead of knocking it off course it breaks it into a thousand smaller steroids that are still on the same course?
*ping*
For that kind of money, we used to expect some real science. This is such a waste. Physics is physics. Colliding objects isnt science.